


guava, lime, and cactus

by dirgewithoutmusic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 12:26:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13903995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: They had Sam turn the wings back in.He got another medal to go in the shoebox under his bed, but they took the wings, shook his hand, and sent him home. He went back to the VA on Monday morning, to be surprised by a Costco sheetcake reading “OUR HERO” at lunch and un-surprised by a massive clog of paperwork on his desk.He went running around the Mall in the early mornings. He wasn’t expecting to see Steve, but he was still somehow surprised when he heard no amused and irritatingly-not-breathless voice chirp out, “On your left,” somewhere behind him. Steve was off with his manila folder of secrets, tearing into old archives and chasing down reported sightings of a ghost. As SHIELD unraveled on international television, Captain Rogers made no more appearances there than he did on the DC Mall, but Natasha Romanoff showed up in pixels: steel-spined and unruffled, her hair falling in straight lines beside her unblinking eyes.





	guava, lime, and cactus

**Author's Note:**

> I just want them both to have nice things

They had Sam turn the wings back in. 

He got another medal to go in the shoebox under his bed, but they took the wings, shook his hand, and sent him home. He went back to the VA on Monday morning, to be surprised by a Costco sheetcake reading “OUR HERO” at lunch and un-surprised by a massive clog of paperwork on his desk.

He went running around the Mall in the early mornings. He wasn’t expecting to see Steve, but he was still somehow surprised when he heard no amused and irritatingly-not-breathless voice chirp out, “On your left,” somewhere behind him. Steve was off with his manila folder of secrets, tearing into old archives and chasing down reported sightings of a ghost. As SHIELD unraveled on international television, Captain Rogers made no more appearances there than he did on the DC Mall, but Natasha Romanoff showed up in pixels– steel-spined and unruffled, her hair falling in straight lines beside her unblinking eyes.

After three weeks of Senate investigations and media dissections half-caught on the radio in corner stores or muted TVs in the backs of diners, Sam came home and found Natasha sitting on his front porch and scrolling through her phone.

Sam ran the pads of his fingers over his scalp and wished for a jacket or longer shorts. He’d cooled down enough that his sweaty tank top and the morning chill were starting to be too much.

“Hey,” she said, flicking her gaze up to him, like she hadn’t marked him coming a half mile down the street.

“Hey.”

Natasha rose up in a quick, unnoticeable movement and held something out to him. He hadn’t noticed it beside her: a gallon of orange juice (light pulp). “Here,” she said, and Sam reached out to take it, cradling it awkwardly in two uncertain hands. “Stay breezy, Wilson,” she said, flicking her fingers at him and thumping down the porch stairs behind.

Sam was left, a little winded, standing staring at his front door and the brick ledge she’d just vacated. He looked down at the plastic jug heavy and freezing cold in his hands. _Thanks -Nat,_ read the post-it note that was slipping off with the moisture beading on it. “What?”

He turned around, still cradling the jug, but she was already down the road, small and bright-haired against the asphalt. Her hair was different, shorter and a little darker. “For that breakfast,” she said, just loud enough to carry to him and no louder.

“Okay,” he said. “Bye?” He stood on his porch holding the orange juice, blinking, until he got shivery enough to head inside to a hot shower. He put the orange juice in the fridge and the post-it stuck up on the fridge door.

* * *

Sam went on runs in the morning. He stood under hot showers, watching the water swirl down the drain, mirror fogging over with steam. He chipped away at his pile of incoming paperwork and talked veterans through insurance papers, benefits legislation, and panic attacks. He sat alone in a dark bathroom cubicle for a half hour after each group session. He microwaved canned soup in paper bowls and tried not to drip it all over the trash novel he read over his lunch hour.

Clips of Natasha’s voice came over the car radio as he drove to work in the morning, and he flipped the stations when the commentators cracked jokes or the word _traitor_. He’d spent long years learning not to swim in toxic waters if it wasn’t necessary. Steve sent him a postcard from Latvia, covered more with little sketched comics than words, and Sam put it up on the fridge beside the ones from Kazakhstan and Bolivia and Natasha’s post-it note.

In a burst of inspiration on a Wednesday, Sam bought fresh green beans and pork chops and fried them up for dinner. He was just pulling them off the stove when he looked up and saw a figure hesitating on his unlit porch.

“That’s fucking creepy,” he said once he’d caught his breath and stopped clenching the frying pan so tight _._ “Why didn’t the porch light go off?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to– here, I’ll go.” She put something down on the low brick wall of the porch.

“Dude,” said Sam. “I can buy my own orange juice. I think Rogers ate the vast majority of that breakfast, anyway.”

She shrugged again and it was elegant, careless, precise. Her face was lit by the light spilling out the kitchen window, but he couldn’t read anything in the way she blinked slowly at him.

“Hey,” he said. “You want to come in? I have enough to share.”

* * *

Sam went on runs in the mornings, around and around the Mall, past tourists stumbling around in the wrong time zone and snapping pictures of white stone and green grass. The carved statues in metal or stone stood up on pedestals, bigger than any man, and Sam thought about Steve Rogers and the dorky little illustrations that were covering more and more of Sam’s fridge.

Sam stood in hot showers and squinted disapprovingly at his ugly grout and made to-do lists in his head. He played Top 40 pop on the way to the VA office. Natasha showed up on his doorstep with a rotating cast of increasingly obscure fruit juices–guava, pomegranate, lychee–that he slowly realized were a sign of some kind of sense of humor.

She brought lime juice and mint sprigs on Riley’s birthday, which he assumed wasn’t a coincidence, and they made mojitos and ordered pizza and both slept on his couches. Natasha was stubborn and Sam’s mama had raised him too well to take up a bed when a guest was without one.

Steve came back to deliver his last postcard by hand– a Bangkok one, where sketches of street stalls and statues warred with the broad thick lines of billboards. He’d found colored pencils somewhere, and Sam made a note to find the guy the glitter gel pens he was clearly lacking in his life.

“I was close, I think,” Steve said while Sam poured him some of Natasha’s latest juice delivery (cactus). “But I don’t think he wants to be found– by anyone. I think I got close enough to know he’s–” Steve’s face shuttered. He finished, with a delicacy that might have surprised a stranger, “okay.”

“I’m guessing it’s a little more complicated than that,” Sam said.

“I wasn’t doing any good there,” Steve said. “Just trying to make myself feel better, to bring him home… but there’s not much home left. Thought I’d be of more use here, and he can find me, if he wants to.”

“Do you think he remembered you?”

“Not enough, or he’d _be_ here,” Steve said, and it was almost a snap. “Or… I don’t know.” He squinted down at his glass. “What is this?”

“Natasha’s fault,” said Sam. “Do you like it?”

Steve shrugged and downed the rest of it.

* * *

Natasha showed up on his television less and his front step more, bringing back juice less often and bruises and limps more. “If Roger’s back in business, so am I,” she told Sam when he hovered too much. “Price of progress, whatever, sit down, Sam.”

Sam chased an American icon around a big green civically-important rectangle in the mornings, then came home to sing off-key in his shower. He ate his tupperware lunches in the break room, or out at the closest cafe with Steve on the days he stumbled by to sit the back of group session, unsuccessfully incognito in a ball cap and jacket.

Natasha started just letting herself in the backyard door. Sam learned she loved sweets and hated radishes but that, like Steve, she would clear her plate regardless of its contents. He bought half-price candy the day after Halloween, then chocolate and marshmallow Santas on December 26th, and bags of on-sale sweet tarts and chocolates and red gummy hearts the day after Valentine’s Day. They vanished from his cabinets, and his fridge never ran out of some kind of juice.

* * *

“Hey, sailor.”

“Shit.” Sam startled up from where he’d been nodding proudly at the egg he’d cracked into his Top Ramen, like the eminent example of the adult species that he was. Natasha slipped behind him into the kitchen and he added, “And ex-fucking-scuse me, I am not a Navy man and you know it.”

“Hey, birdman,” she corrected, rifling through his cabinets in search of who knows what– state secrets or trashy romantic fiction or some smuggled plutonium. She’d half climbed onto Sam’s countertops to do it, because she was nowhere near as tall as she seemed.

“Much better.”

Before she’d clambered up onto his clean counter with the vibrant beginnings of a bruise on her left cheekbone, Sam had been planning on watching _The Great British Bake Off_ until he fell asleep on the couch. He hesitated on the kitchen tile, wondering if she needed a spotter for her countertop acrobatics, then shrugged and carried his steaming bowl to the couch.

He put a pillow on an armrest so she’d have a place to perch when she padded into the living room a few moments later with a bag of marshmallows, a bottle of Nutella, and a butter knife between her teeth like a silverware pirate of the high seas.

“Look at sunburn Paul staring down suntan disaster Paul,” Natasha said around the knife, slipping down onto the couch cushions and pressing her toes up against Sam’s thigh. “You don’t like my fondant? Let’s take this out of the tent and see how you like it _then_ , Hollywood.”

* * *

“Hey.” When he picked up the phone it was in a whisper, the whole room lit only by the glow of the incoming call. “Sorry, momma, I can’t talk right now,–”

“Sammy, do you remember what your cousin Kelly’s pet lizard was called? I’m having a row with your auntie. Yes, Meredith, I’ll tell him hello– hello, sweet boy.”

“Mom, I can’t talk, I got a lady over.”

“Ohhh,” said his mother, whistling out the h’s like she always had– over his first chin hairs, over that one baby blue dress shirt Sam had not so subtly thought he looked so fine in, and over the way he’d watched Riley during those precious days of leave. Sam had dragged him out for bbqs in his momma’s backyard, even in the biting chill of that horrid fall weather, because maybe he’d known even then that that one fall was all they were going to get.

“Yeah, you shush,” he said.

“Now you be safe, baby boy.”

“That ain’t shushing,” he said and she hung up on him in the middle of her humming little laugh.

Natasha’s head was curled into the crook of the couch where the cushion and armrest and seat all met, her hair in her eyes and a bit in her mouth. It was a deeper copper than it had been on her last visit, curls falling out of it as the night went on. Her feet sprawled across his lap with their little purple-painted toes. “You awake?” he said.

“Never again,” she muttered into the couch cushions. “Imma pull a Cap, go get some ice.”

“What did you crazy kids even _do_ this time?”

“Watch the news like the rest of the plebeians,” she said. “I bet we made the nightly, what with Steve being all dapper and carrying damsels out of burning buildings.”

“Here I thought that stench was just you burning up toast in my kitchen.”

“Your toaster’s a fire hazard.”

“And don’t you talk about Steve and his _ass_ ets–”

“I did not say _assets_ , _you_ said _assets-_ -”

“I’ll have you know I’m pining over here, for that shining beacon of blonde nonsense, and I won’t have you rubbing salt into the wound.”

She snorted. “Like you’ve had to bother pining over anyone in your whole life, Wilson,” she said.

“I’m a bother at everything I do,” he said, and pulled the lumpy crochet blanket off the back of the couch on onto her bare feet. She was asleep in moments, or was pretending, or meditating, but whatever it was he hoped it was restful.

One-handed, he typed out a text to his mother: _Colonel Sandman the Magnificent, but we kids all called her Sparkles, so you’re probably both right._

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at ink-splotch.tumblr.com -- come say hi!


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